Messing
about with tradition claims victims. And in some places
this is more visible than others; the big difference for
me when I crossed the border was the number of ruined
churches I encountered. Suffolk has barely a dozen;
Norfolk has almost a hundred. Some are survivors of lost
communities, but most sit quietly in otherwise lively
towns and villages, mute witness to changing needs.

As I explored
on the introduction to Cawston and Salle, Medieval churches were not
designed for congregational Anglican worship. Their size
does not reflect the need to accomodate a large
congregation; they were never intended to be full. But
once the need for processions, expositions, guild and
chapel altars and private devotions had passed, all that
compelled their survival was their suitability for
congregations. After the Reformation, the Church of
England was saddled with thousands of over-large
buildings unsuited to their reformed use.

Another
result of the Reformation and the triumph of puritanism
was a deep suspicion of all things medieval, and this,
inevitably, led to a careless attitude to the fabric of
the buildings. In East Anglia, many churches are
constructed out of flint and clunch; if not properly
maintained, these soft materials can cause buildings to
collapse, and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries many
of them did.

Inspired by
the ideas coming out of Oxford in the early 19th century,
the Victorians oversaw a return to the Church of England
of Medieval ideas, forms and passions. They recognised
that many medieval churches were in a bit of a state.
They enthusiastically repaired, restored and reordered
them. This was handled more sensitively some places than
others.

There is no
doubt that Victorian triumphalism seriously
over-stretched the Church of England, especially in rural
areas with declining populations. This decline had set in
early in Norfolk; by about 1850 many villages were
haemorrhaging their communities to the towns. Two world
wars helped sustain some sort of belief through the first
half of the 20th century, but by the 1970s it was
inevitable that Dioceses like Norwich would have to
seriously reconsider the extent to which their resources
were spread. There were simply too many churches to
maintain for too few people.

Nowadays, the
CofE tends to be a bit more sensitive to the needs of
local communities, devolving ministry into lay hands in
an attempt to keep as many churches in commission as
possible. But in the 1970s, redundancy seemed a sensible
quick-fix option. Many redundant churches of significance
were vested in the care of the Redundant Churches Fund
(although tragically this did not happen as often as it
should have done) but many were simply put on the market
for conversion into homes.

An insidious
part of the legislation that governed redundancy was that
if a building was not listed at a sufficiently high
level, then failure to find a new use within three years
would result in its mandatory demolition.

Here, then,
are three churches that are ruins for apparently
different reasons. Bastwick fell foul of the Reformation, Billockby of misfortune and poor maintenance, and Panxworth of Victorian over-enthusiasm. But in fact
there was one over-arching imperative that led to their
demise, a nagging doubt that returns again and again to
haunt the Church of England: medieval churches are not
ideally suited to congregational Anglican worship.
Victorian attempts to return the CofE to its medieval
roots postponed the loss of many buildings, but now we
sit on the edge of the precipice again. How the Church of
England manages its own decline over the next few decades
will determine the fate of many, and be a measure of our
values as a civilised nation.